“Europe’s latest intelligence fakes.”

And the long history behind them.

They say it’s a Russian drone. In Ukraine, January 2024. (National Police of Ukraine, cc by 4.0/ Wikimedia Commons.)

Having lived through most of the Cold War years, we thought there was no outdoing the Americans in the way of Russophobic paranoia. Who would ever have imagined the Europeans, Germany and some of the former Soviet satellites in the lead, would prove us wrong in this third decade of the 21^st century?

The other day we read a New York Times piece in this line that made our socks roll up and down. It seems that Stephen Erlanger, once but no longer a balanced correspondent for the once-but-no-longer newspaper of record, interviewed Alexander Sollfrank, and gave the top general in the Wehrmacht a generous platform from which to spout what has lately become the European orthodoxy. “The only way for Putin to stop is if he is stopped,” Sollfrank, who previously served as a senior NATO commander, says in the second paragraph of Erlanger’s piece.

We had to read on after an opening act of this absurdity. Just how far from reality does this guy operate?

Very far, it turns out. As far as any of the noted old Cold Warriors who poisoned the American consciousness all those decades ago.

“If Russia is successful,” Sollfrank said of the Russian intervention in Ukraine, “then these achievements of law, of right over might, are over.” And: “We should support Ukraine with everything they need, with everything they require to reduce the Russian pressure.”

It is important, in our view, to understand extravagant fallacies of this kind as what they are. Among other things, they are dangerous.

Parenthetically, I charge Erlanger, who is based in Brussels these days, with two counts of professional dereliction in the first degree. One, he gave Stollfrank all these column inches with absolutely no effort to report independently on the veracity or otherwise of the general’s assertions. Not even a flick: The only sources he quotes other than Sollfrank are a German military analyst and the British Defence Ministry, both of which serve to reinforce the German officer’s alarmism.

Two, Erlanger terms Sollfrank “a nonpolitical military commander.” I will let this descriptive speak for itself.

I do not ordinarily provide links to New York Times reports. I offer one to the Erlanger piece, here, on a strictly see-it-to-believe-it basis.

It is not clear just when Europe’s “centrist” elites and the militarists they adulate started escalating their campaign to induce, in Cold War fashion, fears and phobias against the Russian Federation. My surmise is this reflects concern in the Continent’s capitals that Washington in the time of Trump is no longer reliable as the fount of Russophobic excess it has long been.

We mention Sollfrank’s remarks to suggest the systematic relentlessness of Europe’s war-mongering propagandists. Erlanger interviewed him just a few weeks after a spate of reports to the effect Russian aircraft are now, and by design, breaching European airspace as a prelude to an invasion.

Twenty or so Russian drones crossed into Polish airspace, a Russian drone flies above Romania, three Russian MiGs spent 12 minutes in Estonian airspace: All this we have read about of late. Never mind that some of these incidents, if not most, have been proven to be false flags. Drones shot down in Poland did not have sufficient range to have originated in Russia: This according to Sergei Lavrov, the Russian FM. Others reportedly contained components Russia could not possibly possess.

Of these matters we read nothing.

As we go to press, The Times reports on reports from German authorities of drone sightings at an industrial zone near Hamburg, at the airport in Munich, at the seaport in Kiel. In this piece The Times lifts a quotation from an interview Friedrich Merz gave earlier this month. “We suspect that Russia is behind most of these drone fights, from those who want to test us,” the German chancellor told German television.

There seems little prospect this kind of substanceless fear-mongering will stop any time soon. We earlier referred to European paranoia: Is this the correct term? Or do we witness a cynical effort to poison public opinion across the Continent, just as America’s was polluted decades ago?

In the piece that follows, Helmut Scheben, the distinguished Swiss correspondent and editor, shreds the fictions surrounding these recent reports and in so doing goes some way to answering the above-posed question. This seems to be Helmut’s preferred mode these days. He first graced The Floutist’s pages with his 23 August investigation, “Those Russian ‘kidnappers,’” in which he exposed the monstrous fraud intended to taint Russia’s humanitarian effort to protect Ukrainian children caught up in war.

The Floutist is dedicated to including European perspectives and European writers in our editorial mix. We welcome Helmut Scheben back into our pages as one of our Continental contributors.

—The Editors.

Helmut Scheben.

ZÜRICH—Drone alerts from London to Warsaw, from Warsaw to Copenhagen and Oslo. Public opinion says these are Russian cyberattacks. However, a look back at Western intelligence agencies’ fake news stories of the past 80 years raises doubts.

“The Russians are really becoming omnipresent,” say Mr. and Mrs. Swiss, not noticing that a large drone is flying over their heads. A cartoon in the Zürich newspaper Tages-Anzeiger of 14 September shows a married couple in front of the TV screen. The latest news is being shown from Denmark, where Russian drones are said to have disrupted airport operations.

Finally, a cartoon that pokes fun at the rampant drone scare, one might think at first glance. But the opposite is the case: This is not a satire; it is all meant seriously. Newspaper readers are being told what is in store for them: The Russians have their drones everywhere, but Mr. and Mrs. Biedermann have still not noticed. They only see the Russians in Copenhagen, but not the Russians in Heidiland, as the nickname for Switzerland has it.

If you continue to leaf through the newspaper, you will learn how dire the situation (allegedly) is. “Satellite images expose Putin’s rearmament,” reads the headline in Tages–Anzeiger, a Zürich daily, and we are informed: “Military experts consider it virtually certain that the Russians will attack Europe and NATO in the near future. According to Western intelligence agencies, Russia will be ready for a major war by 2029.”

War against Russia is therefore considered inevitable: This is the slogan that has been repeated incessantly for months now to justify a gigantic rearmament, the scope of which is unprecedented in European history.¹

What should make the military layman and the sober newspaper reader sceptical is the statement by Troels Lund Poulsen, the Danish defence minister, “We don’t know who is behind the flights.” ² There is no evidence that Russia had anything to do with them. But it is clear, he says, that certain “countries or actors” have an interest in undermining Denmark’s support for Ukraine.

Russia, as is by now well-known, denies any responsibility for the unidentified flying objects.

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More substantial doubts about the drone story arise when one considers that the ominous flying objects disappeared without being identified, captured, or shot down. It is hard to believe that, for example, the Danish police and a Danish Air Force equipped to NATO standards would not be able to bring these things down from the sky before they disappeared over the sea.

You will remember Yuri Andropov, general secretary of the USSR from 1982 until his death two years later, who once laughingly told Finnish President Mauno Koivisto: “Bomb them. It’s fine with us.”³ He was referring to the “Soviet submarines” spotted off the Swedish coast in 1984. Andropov knew they were not Russian submarines, but a false flag operation by Western intelligence agencies. These mysterious boats were never captured. The “Soviet threat” proved to be a perfect way to sabotage Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme’s policy of détente.

In 2023, a multitude of balloons were suddenly spotted in the sky of the United States, Canada, and other parts of the world, which the Biden administration immediately sought to identify as Chinese spy balloons. Biden announced that China was sending these balloons to spy on military facilities in the West. Beijing stated that these were weather balloons used for meteorological research. Some of them had been blown off course by wind conditions.

In November 2024, mysterious drones were spotted on the U.S. East Coast and eventually throughout the country. The Defence Department was alarmed. Authorities had to investigate more than 3,000 reports, but no useful results emerged.

So now drones are flying over Poland, Denmark, and Norway. Airports have to be temporarily closed. NATO is in crisis mode discussing “Putin’s airspace provocations,” and Mike Waltz, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., is reciting the well-known creed: “We will defend every inch of NATO territory.”

Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski threatened before the U.N. Security Council he would have Russian aircraft shot down.⁴ In the port of Hamburg, military exercises are already rehearsing the arrival of NATO troops for deployment to the Eastern Front, and the German medical profession is being prepared for “patient care in an emergency.”⁵ In Switzerland, the Defence Department is sounding the alarm: Even the best Leopard 2 battle tank is useless against drones. “Though this be madness, yet there is method in it,” as Shakespeare puts it.

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It is undoubtedly possible that Moscow has military provocations in mind and is deliberately violating territorial sovereignty in the air. But the greed—one could almost call it lasciviousness—with which every new “intelligence finding” about Russian threats is being absorbed by major Western media should sound a note of caution.

Do the journalists who are writing their fingers to the bone about the Russian threat have no historical education, no knowledge of history? They were trained for their profession: Have they not learned that it is their job critically to evaluate the intelligence services’ and NATO strategy experts’ “findings”? Or does Upton Sinclair’s nasty sentence apply: “It is difficult to get a person to understand something when their salary depends on their not understanding it?” In his 2013 study, “Opinion Power,” Uwe Krüger, the prominent German media critic, demonstrated that alpha journalists belonging to almost all major Western media outlets are integrated into NATO–friendly networks.

After the failed U.S. attack on Cuba in 1961, the infamous Bay of Pigs invasion, former President Harry Truman wrote that the Central Intelligence Agency had gotten completely out of control:

When I founded the C.I.A. [in 1947], I never imagined that in peacetime, it could be associated with dark assassination plots. It has become an operational arm of the government and occasionally even engages in politics. I would like to see its operational duties terminated.

This comment appeared in The Washington Post on 22 December 1963 under the headline, “Limit CIA Role to Intelligence.” President Kennedy had been assassinated a month earlier to the day.

Truman could never have imagined how many subsequent wars and military coups would be justified by “information gathered by Western intelligence agencies” and how the public would be misled.

The “findings” that the United States would have to fend off communism or some other enemy somewhere in the world and bring freedom and democracy to an oppressed people were always disseminated with extreme effectiveness. At that, freedom and democracy were often saved by being abolished: in 1947 in Greece, 1948 in Venezuela, 1950 in Korea, 1953 in Iran, 1954 in Guatemala, 1955 in Vietnam, 1961 in Cuba, 1965 in Indonesia, 1973 in Chile, 1979 in Nicaragua, 1980 in El Salvador, 1979 in Afghanistan, 1999 in Yugoslavia, 2001 once again in Afghanistan, 2003 in Iraq, 2011 in Libya and subsequently in Syria, to note just a few of the military and intelligence interventions of the West.

The military-industrial complex, which President Eisenhower famously warned of as he left office in January 1961, developed a PR machine during the Cold War, involving tens of thousands of diligent strategy experts, conflict researchers, human rights activists, and journalists to create enemy images. This approach has not changed to this day. In their classic book, Public Relations for War and Death, Jörg Becker and Mira Beham demonstrate how the manipulation of public opinion worked in the Balkan Wars.

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If we are to believe the Zürich Tages-Anzeiger and the Western intelligence agencies, to which the above newspaper refers, Russian tanks will soon be stationed in front of NATO headquarters: “Putin kommt der Nato–Zerstörung immer näher” (“Putin is getting ever closer to destroying NATO”), the paper headlined on 22 September.

There are words that spread like an epidemic. The new wording is “testing.” Apparently, the Russians want to test our defence capabilities. Whatever troubles occur, they can have no cause other than the one we already know: The Russians are testing us again. If a Russian plane flies over a Polish oil platform in the Baltic Sea, the Russians have once again “invaded airspace.” And if the plane carrying Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the E.U. Commission, is delayed due to a technical problem, this is undoubtedly a Russian cyberattack. The media preferred not to broadcast the fact that this turned out to be nonsense.

Also, the problems in rail traffic in Germany or France and the software crashes at European airports can only be caused by the Russians. Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the influential Swiss daily, knows: “The Kremlin is using sabotage as a strategic tool.”⁶ For our leading media, the apocalypse seems to be inevitable. One is almost tempted to check whether the editorial offices have already begun digging their trenches on Zürich’s Werdstrasse or Falkenstrasse. Soon, we would no longer be surprised if the evening traffic jam on Zürich’s western bypass were the product of Russian cyber warfare and if the first Russian submarine appeared in Lake Constance.

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Of course, one could argue that the war in Ukraine is real and not an invention of Western intelligence services. Russia has indeed invaded Ukraine and thereby violated international law. But that is only half the truth, and a half-truth that hides its rotten side is often a sophisticated form of lying.

Because whether we like it or not, the advance of a hostile military alliance into Sevastopol, the most important Russian naval base on the Black Sea, which has moreover been Russia’s gateway to the world for centuries, was perceived as a threat in Moscow. And if the NATO brass and Washington had not thrown the Russian draft agreements for defusing the conflict in the trash in December 2021, this war would probably never have happened. But the major Western media outlets are making great efforts to prevent this reality from entering our perceptual framing.

In the mid–1970s, it became known that the C.I.A. was collaborating with major news outlets to manipulate public opinion. This was “Operation Mockingbird.” The C.I.A. denied the operation and also denied any media interference. However, it is proven that media outlets—including The New York Times, A.B.C., N.B.C., C.B.S., Newsweek, The Miami Herald, and many other media—were manipulated. The C.I.A. supplied their journalists with texts, which the latter subsequently published or broadcast. Since it is common practice for media to absorb this kind of information, even unsuspecting journalists disseminated content originally written by the C.I.A.

There are undoubtedly many journalists of integrity trying to find the truth. But, as political scientist Ulrich Teusch once wrote, these attempts are reminiscent of the race between the hare and the tortoise.

The tortoise is always already there, saying: Ladies and gentlemen, because this happened, we will do that. And the investigative hare runs itself ragged trying to determine whether “this” actually happened and, consequently, whether “that” is justified. But no matter how much haste it makes, it always arrives too late. In lucky cases, the delay lasts only days, and then the truth comes to light. But usually it takes years, or we never learn the truth.

When the poison gas sarin was used in a Damascus suburb in 2013, John Kerry, then the secretary of state, declared that the U.S. had reliable information that Bashar al–Assad, the Syrian president, was responsible. “He said it on more than 30 occasions. We counted,” Ray McGovern, the highly regarded former C.I.A. analyst told me a few years later. He added: “In the Syrian war, there were as many lies in Washington as there were in the Iraq war.”

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¹ https://globalbridge.ch/kriegsvorbereitung-als-neuer-way-of-life/.

² https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/drohnen-ueber-den-den-flughaefen-wer-steckt-dahinter-73597111743.

³ https://www.infosperber.ch/politik/europa/wer-hatte-angst-vor-olof-palme/.

⁴ https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/polen-warnt-russland-sikorski-droht-mit-abschuss-931051048438.

⁵ https://www.infosperber.ch/gesundheit/wie-sich-militaer-und-medizin-in-deutschland-verflechten/.

⁶ https://www.nzz.ch/pro/brandanschlaege-und-explosionen-wie-der-kreml-mit-wegwerf-agenten-sabotageakte-veruebt-und-damit-europa-herausfordert-ld.1899289.

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Helmut Scheben served as a correspondent in Mexico and Central America for many years. He subsequently edited WoZ, the Zürich weekly, and was later an editor and reporter for Swiss television, SRF.

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This piece was first published in German in Global Bridge on 29 September. We republish it simultaneously with Current Concerns and its associated journals, Zeit–Fragen and Horizons et débats. This translation is courtesy of Current Concerns.

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